If you want to wear the same clothes all year round
Corduroy is best, so I have found
A skirt of olive green  with a bralet
Will take you through the summer ever hot
And worn with wool in winter it suits all
Underneath a duffel coat and shawl
Similarly trousers  of fine cord
Are in season, thank you, praise the Lord
So what you wear on your top half  is key
But don’t go nude and blame it all on me!
Especially if you go commando too
What will all  the knicker makers do?

I love the rich variety of folk
I see when I go out for daily walks
The British lassies show their midriffs bare
Arabs saunter in their desert wear.

The Hasidim come up from N16
They go in TKMaxx and faces beam.
The Doctor who repaired my sickly nose
In the heat of Athens was well raised.

And many other people are discreet
Although through their big phones they sweetly speak
I bet they’re saying London’s really  fine
The shops sell everything apart from swine!

O peoples of the world I like to see,
That you are different yet the same as me

I hope the Jews of Europe will not leave
As already of their kind we’ve been bereaved
Since I’ve read their Bible   ardently
I hope to hear that still, small voice in me.

Shakespeare and the Bible are  our greats
True literature for any appetite.
Non -believers can enjoy the psalms
At 4 am calm nightmarish alarms.

Or see the myths and metaphors  designed
To share the parables of  greater minds
We do have ancient Greeks who also taught.
The Hebrew Bible’s longer, dense and taut.

I would  like to see  the Burning Bush
Yet I fear I’d die in flames of love

Is poetry  just a form we fill with words
Or is it something deeper or absurd?
Hitler might have written villanelles
With words uttered by demons out of hell.

Demons are not real, it’s we who are
And hell is here on earth, I sadly say.
Heaven too  is found where love can grow
When it is not for grasping or for show,

What can make a man engage such power;
He took Europe through its worst years ever.
Men and women ran like robots steel;
Were made machines without  the will to feel.

The forms of  poetry may be  divine
But evil can parade through any lines.

How to make your wardrobe transit months
Of heat and rain and cold felt all at once.
Underneath a frock, wear leggings gay
Remove them when the sun comes put to play.
Try a camisole of radiant hue
If it shows, well all the better too.
Bring out that old cardigan  of wool;
Not red in case you pass a Papal bull.
Try a long one down to ankles blue
It will gain attention, no taboo.
Or how about a hat like mother wore?
A hot head helps to warm the central core.
A   pair of thermal underpants will warm
The parts that no one ever wants to name
So layer by layer, we build that summer dress
Into a wardrobe only folk like us access.
But if you want the men to stick to you
Wear some trainers  and a little glue.

First, the glass of my new watch had cracked
Then my credit card had disappeared.
This caused me an alarm like a great smack
And home I came. before new devils leered.

Inside the wallet ,where I keep some notes,
This credit card had found a peaceful rest
My pen though dry decided it would write
Though what I write is nowhere near my best

I wonder if I need a watch at all.
The mobile phone is accurate and clear.
Yet watches have significance past call.
And this one is to my heart rather dear.

On a day when sensing vertigo,
Stay at home, put polish on your toes!

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/jun/18/poetry-can-heal-it-helped-me-through-depression

“Arguably, it may be the refusal to create one’s art that causes distress in the first place. John Keats, a licensed apothecary, as was Dante, trained unhappily as a doctor and experienced depression accordingly: his brother feared that if John didn’t become a poet he would kill himself. An unanswered calling can take its revenge, and Gwyneth Lewis’s memoir of depression, Sunbathing in the Rain, notes that it was her resistance to writing poetry that made her ill: “If you don’t do what your poetry wants you to, it will be out to get you. Unwritten poems are a force to be feared.””

I doubt if everyone is like Gwyneth Lewis but I agree unused capacity can make people ill.That’s why Evening Classes were so beneficial to ordinary people with a desire to learn.Very few are left now thanks to Mrs Thatcher.

Thanks for phoning.I have a nasty cough and can’t talk.
You have reached Katherine.Please leave a comment.
I am a poet and don’t I know it!
Thanks for asking me out.I have a box of dates right here.
No, I am not getting married again, even to you, my angel.
I can’t answer the phone as it never speaks
Unless you are Leonard Cohen please hang up now.
This is a robotic answering machine.I don’t take messages kindly.Please leave the kiosk as you found it
Yes,I did have a nice day and that is why I’m not ruining it by answering the phone.Ta ta.

لا يكفيك أن تنساها .. يجب كذلك أن تنسى أنك نسيتها !

It is not enough to forget her. You have also to forget that you forgot her!

أملى أكبر من جهدى .. وجهدي أكبر من موهبتي .. وموهبتى سجينة طبعي .. ولكنى أقاوم

My ambition is greater than my effort. My effort is greater than my talent. And my talent is a hostage of my temper. But I persist

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/is-it-time-for-the-jews-to-leave-europe/386279/

“France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population. Yet last year, according to the French Interior Ministry, 51 percent of all racist attacks targeted Jews. The statistics in other countries, including Great Britain, are similarly dismal. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish. Sale Juif—“dirty Jew”—rang in the streets, as did “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.””

The epithet dirty Jew, Zola wrote in “J’Accuse …!,” was the “scourge of our time.” “J’Accuse …!” was published in 1898.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/paul-celan

Extract

In Paris, he taught German language and literature at L’École Normale Supérieure and earned a significant portion of his income as a translator, translating a wide range of work, from Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Emily Dickinson to Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, and Charles Baudelaire. His own work as been translated into English numerous times and by several noted poets and translators including Michael Hamburger, Rosmarie Waldrop, Heather McHugh, John Felstiner, and Pierre Joris.

Though he lived in France and was influenced by the French surrealists, he wrote his own poetry in German. His first collection of poems, Sand from the Urns, was published in Vienna in 1948; his second collection, Poppy and Memory (Mohn und Gedaechtnis, 1952), brought him critical acclaim. Katherine Washburn, his translator, noted in her introduction to Last Poems (1986): “The title of this book [Poppy and Memory] pointed with a fine vividness to the central predicament of Celan’s poetry—the unstable and dangerous union between Paul Celan, caught early in that sensual music of the Surrealists, pure poet of the intoxicating line, and Paul Ancel, heir and hostage to the most lacerating of human memories.”

While Celan is perhaps best known for his poem “Death Fugue” (or “Todesfuge”), it is not necessarily representative of his later work. Reviewing the 1981 publication Paul Celan: Poems in the New York Times, Rika Lesser said the poem’s “richly sonic, dactylic lines (spoken by the inmates of a camp), while typical of Celan’s mastery of form, content, texture and sound, are hardly indicative of the direction his composition would later take.” As his career continued, Celan worked to “purge his poems of readymade contexts – whether historical, traditional or explicitly religious. The late poems still abound in allusions – private, hermeneutic, esoteric – but increasingly each poem becomes and creates its own context and the context within which Celan’s other poems must be read.”

This transformation has much to do with the language in which Celan wrote. As Shoshana Olidort notes in her Chicago Tribune review of Breathturn Into Timestead: Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan (trans. by Pierre Joris and published by FSG, 2014), Celan was “a Holocaust survivor, [who] wrote in German, his mother tongue and also the language of his mother’s murderers … As a German-speaking Jewish survivor living in France, Celan harbored feelings of intense estrangement from the language and thus set about creating his own language through what Joris eloquently describes as a “dismantling and rewelding” of German. The result, Olidort writes, “is arguably even darker than his earlier poems with their direct references to the Shoah. For Celan, darkness is not willed obscurity, rather, the poem comes out of lived experience and is “born dark.”

I looked up at the window of his room
And felt a pang of grief  he is not there
As if I have awakened from a dream
Over me, reality now looms
I have not absorbed my grief, my doom
So little demons constantly reveal
I looked up at the window of his room
And felt my anguish that he is not here

The sky  is stark, the air is cool and still
The black cat’s  run, the birds unfold all day
I sit  down here and with my totty pray
Ye cast o’ foolish thoughts, you raped my will.
We’ve  each enraged the bureaucratic mill.
Oh frigid purse, I never meant to pay!
The sky ‘s  a’spark, the air is warm and shrill
The saturnine demoted  knelled their way
With this feathered pounce, my sample quill,
I  cite the cheque and date it for next May.
Oh, tit for cat, the Tiger’s bed ‘s astray.
Yer  life is settled by  a  harlot’s will
The sky ‘s a shark, the air is sharper still.

The  many teardrops falling from my eyes
Coalesced into a large one as they flowed
And so a little water may give rise
To a river ,then an ocean wide.

As I wept, the large teardrop fell off
And made a mark upon my brand new blouse
For my mascara made it  black and  rough
And thus with a black stain, I was endowed.

If you plan to  weep, then wear old clothes
So you can sob and cry as free as Eve
But it  you are hit, surprised by some old woe
Just pretend of cat you’ve been bereaved.

As little tear drops make a crystal stream
So random happenings turn into our dreams.

Around a splinter, inflammation grows
It seems to be the cause of  many ills
Scar tissue coalesces and may show

I  got a safety pin stuck in my toe
I had a shot of tetanus but not a pill
Around the splinter, inflammation grows

I  trod on this old pin, yet didn’t know
Yet it caused a risk that I’d be ill
Scar tissue coalesces and may show

If it is a bit of wood or claw
The body separates it by a wall
Around the splinter, inflammation grows

My father used a needle, poked  to draw
Until I screamed and uttered a loud wail
Scar tissue coalesces and may show

If no one helps, enormous grows what’s small
Until it brings about our human Fall
Around the splinter, inflammation grows
Scar tissue coalesces and may show

https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day

The face that was familiar is no more
Yet in my dreams, he is alive again
If, by a chance, his life could be restored
It would affect me like the hidden chord
That if were played, my own life would be o’er
That one must live and one must die is plain
The face that was familiar is no more.
Yet in my dreams , he is alive again

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509585.2014.899763?src=recsys,

Extract:

I argue that the oft-discussed connection between Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness” and Keats’s “negative capability” has led scholars to overlook Keats’s own notion of passivity as a persuasive, as well as receptive, force. I argue that Keats saw passivity as an embodied, and even physically demanding, attitude, that could prompt the interest and attention of others – an understanding that builds on the theatrical attitudes adopted by Romantic stage actors, who struck exciting poses to suspend dramatic intensity.

 



When wanderings take my restless mind
To places peace can never find,
When imaginations linked to fear
Push tranquillity away.
To my green garden I must go
And let my mind and thoughts go slow.
I look  at maples in the breeze,
See sunlight dappled through their leaves.
I see the apples hanging down
And blackbirds peck them on the ground.
I see the hawthorn berries ripe
Upon the hedge in gold sunlight.
And then my soul is brought to earth
Peacefulness is given birth
I feel at one with nature green,
And all that is just now unseen
So back to everyday routines
Without “what for?” and “might have beens”
All is well and shall be so
Wherever we may go.

Oh, crutch you are a help to my bad  knee
Since cycling down the A1 injured me.
I never knew I should have bought a car
And spent my money on a stunning bra.
I only drove at 70mph
The teacher said, why don’t you learn to steer?
And if you go as fast as this you’ll fail
The police will come and you’ll end up in jail
So I never took a driving test
As riding bikes or donkeys seemed the best
But now my knees are giving me some jip
I sometimes weep and bite my bottom lip
With a crutch, I can negotiate
The steps my eye can’t see, the fallen plate
For  my sight is not creating in 3 d
Steps are dangerous to the half blind ones me.
But with a stick, I test the steps descent
A stick or crutch thus accidents prevents
Yet  suddenly I am a crippled fool,
Though other folks like me send out a smile
From young to old in one astounding leap
As with my crutch along the road I creep.
It’s better for my health to take a walk
Or to my crutch I have been heard to talk
I say switch off the laptop close the lid
And answer, who are you talking to, our kid?
Sometimes I say, oh, we need meringues.
That’s me and all my  numerous inner gang